OUR mission
We make data available and actionable to humans and agents, everywhere.
The Problem
Michel Tricot spent seven years at LiveRamp building and scaling over 1,000 data connectors that moved hundreds of terabytes every day. The pattern was always the same: every company rebuilt the same integrations from scratch, maintained the same brittle scripts, and lost the same engineering hours to the same solved problems. Data integration was the plumbing that every data team needed
and nobody wanted to build.
The Pivot
In January 2020, Michel and Jean Lafleur joined Y Combinator's W20 batch as a "pre-idea" company: two founders with deep experience in a problem space, looking for the right product. Their first idea targeted marketing teams. Then COVID hit and those teams froze. Through hundreds of customer interviews, one insight kept surfacing: every data team maintained custom scripts alongside their existing tools to cover the integrations that no vendor supported. The long tail of data sources was unsolved, and no closed-source company could ever cover it.
Developing in the Open
They bet on open source. From July to September 2020, they built an MVP with 6 connectors and shipped it. The thesis: only an open-source approach could solve the long tail of data integration, because it lets the community build and maintain connectors that no single vendor would ever prioritize. Usage doubled every month.
Building a Platform
What started as 6 connectors grew to 600+. Airbyte invested heavily in speed and reliability, making syncs up to 10x faster and cutting high-volume warehouse loads by 95%. Businesses including Rakuten, 1Password, and Nebius adopted the platform for production workloads. Cloud infrastructure scaled to handle billions of records daily. The open-source community grew to 1,300+ contributors and 20,000+ GitHub stars, accelerating innovation.
Today and the Future
The world is changing. AI agents are becoming the primary consumers of enterprise data, not just analysts and dashboards. Airbyte is meeting that shift head-on with Airbyte Agents, a new product that gives AI agents the ability to access data at production scale. The mission is the same: make data available and actionable to everyone, everywhere. "Everyone" now includes agents.
“The last ten years were all about structured data. The future is all about context.”
- Michel Tricot
The Founders
Michel started his career as an R&D engineer at FactSet in Paris in 2008, then moved to San Francisco in 2011 to join Rapleaf, which became LiveRamp. Over seven years there, he built and scaled over 1,000 data connectors moving hundreds of terabytes daily, and watched every company he worked with solve the same integration problems from scratch.
That pattern became the motivation for Airbyte: an open-source platform that could solve data integration once and let the community maintain it forever. Today he leads the company's expansion from data replication into agentic data infrastructure, and writes regularly about where data movement is headed.
Michel Tricot
CEO and Co-Founder
Jean is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded four startups before Airbyte, two of which were acquired, including CodinGame. He studied mathematics and physics at École Polytechnique, earned a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and served as an officer in the French Navy.
At Airbyte, he's channeled that range of experience into building the go-to-market engine that took the company from an open-source project to an enterprise platform used by thousands of companies worldwide.
Jean Lafleur
COO and Co-Founder
The Numbers that make Airbyte special
20%
of the F500 uses Airbyte
1.2M
Pipelines synced daily
600+
Data Replication Connectors
100+
Agent Connectors
$181M
Raised from top-tier investors
20K
Github stars
27K
Community members
7K
Companies use Airbyte
Trusted by AI and Data leaders
Sean Carver
Director of Data at PetDesk
"The real ROI is in our ability to iterate quickly, especially at our increasing scale. At the end of the day, you want a tool like that to just work. We can forget about it and know that it's configured and it's connecting and it's working. That hands-free capability is a big appeal for the platform.”
Mondor La Grange
Head of BI and Data Engineering
"Unlike Fivetran's credit-based system that created budget uncertainty, Airbyte's pricing model allows Kuda to forecast expenses accurately and avoid surprise bills."
Amy Zhao
Senior Manager of Data Engineering
"What's different from Stitch Data or Informatica is the way that we can configure Airbyte connections and Airbyte entities through code. That's a huge plus to us as data engineers, because we are used to checking code and being able to manage changes from Github."
Franziska Ibscher
Product Manager at Drivepoint
"Airbyte allows us to stay flexible while scaling from hundred-million to billion-dollar enterprise clients."
Funded by leading investors
Come build the future of Context Infrastructure with us
Whether you want to join as a contributor, or come work at Airbyte, we embrace builders and innovators of all backgrounds.